Tag: Samsung

Small enough to serve as a personal monochrome laser printer, the Samsung Xpress M2835DW ($159.99) is also capable enough to be a good fit as a shared printer in a micro office. It doesn’t offer quite enough to topple the Editors’ ChoiceXpress M2825DW$122.00 at Amazon it’s replacing in Samsung’s line. It costs a little more and the competition today is a bit tougher, but it’s still a strong contender.

The M2835DW$159.00 at Amazon lets you connect via USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct. If you connect it to a network, you can print though the cloud, and from Android and iOS smartphones and tablets through an access point. Thanks to Wi-Fi Direct, even if you connect it to a PC by USB cable to use it as a personal printer, you can print directly from your mobile device.

In addition, you get NFC support, which means that if you have a compatible mobile device, you can connect simply by touching that phone or tablet to a clearly marked spot on the printer, and then print using Samsung’s app. During testing, I ran into a minor problem with the NFC connection at first with a Samsung Galaxy S III, but after turning everything off and back on again, the connection worked as promised.

Paper Handling and SetupAt only 8 by 14.5 by 13.2 inches (HWD) and 16.4 pounds, the M2835DW is small enough to comfortably share a desk with and light enough for one person to move easily, which helps make it a good choice as a personal printer. Even so, it offers ample paper handling for a shared printer, with a 250-sheet input tray, a duplexer (for two-sided printing), and a one-sheet manual feed. This should be more than enough for most personal or micro-office use.

For my tests, I connected the printer using its Ethernet port and installed the drivers on a system running Windows Vista. Setting the printer up on a network was absolutely typical for a mono laser.

Speed and Output QualityThe engine rating for the M2835DW is 29 pages per minute (ppm), the same as for the Samsung M2825DW. Not surprisingly, the two printers came in at essentially the same speed on our tests. I timed it on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic’shardware and software for timing), at 9.7ppm, compared with 9.9ppm for the Samsung M2825DW. (A 0.2ppm difference at this speed isn’t significant.)

The 9.7ppm translates to solid, but not particularly fast, performance for the price. TheBrother HL-2270DW$79.99 at Amazon, for example, came in at 11.7ppm. Even more impressive is the Canon imageClass LBP6200d$126.75 at Canon, which came in at 11.1ppm for its official speed in its default duplex setting, and a much faster 14.5ppm when set to simplex (one-sided) printing. However, the Canon LBP6200d connects by USB only, which is fine for using it as personal printer, but makes it a poor choice for a shared printer.

Output quality for the M2835DW is typical for a monochrome laser across the board. The text score in my tests fell in the middle of a fairly tight range that includes the vast majority of monochrome laser printers. Output is suitable for virtually any business use, but not quite good enough for serious desktop publishing applications.

Graphics, similarly, are easily good enough for any internal business need. Most people would also consider them good enough for PowerPoint handouts or the like. Photos quality is roughly newspaper-level.

The Samsung M2825DW earned our Editors’ Choice not because of any particularly notable feature, but because of its balance of features. Both the Canon LBP6200d and the Brother HL-2270DW will give you more impressive speed, for example, but they also score slightly lower for quality.

The good news about the Samsung Xpress M2835DW is that it essentially matches the Samsung M2825DW on speed, output quality, and paper handling. Unfortunately, given the slight boost in price compared with the older model (which is still widely available online), and that some of the competition—most notably the Canon LBP6200d—delivers significantly faster speed, the M2835DW doesn’t offer quite enough to earn the Editors’ Choice distinction. That said, it’s still an attractive choice, and it can certainly be a good fit as either a personal printer or as a shared printer in a micro office.

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Clearly designed for personal, rather than office use, the Samsung Xpress M2020W ($129.99) monochrome laser printer offers reasonably good speed along with output quality that’s good enough for most business needs. It also offers Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, and NFC support, which gives it an edge over much of its competition. Unfortunately, its running cost is high enough to be a potential issue if you need it for anything more than extremely light-duty use.

Like the Brother HL-2240$81.93 at Amazon and Samsung’s own Xpress M2625D$71.09 at Amazon, which is our Editors’ Choice for a low-cost personal monochrome laser, the M2020W$68.79 at Amazon is smaller than most inkjets, at 7.0 by 13.0 by 8.5 inches. The combination of the small size and a low paper capacity, at 150 sheets, is what defines the M2020 as a personal printer.

One advantage the M2020W has over both the Brother HL-2240 and Samsung M2625D is its Wi-Fi support, although not in the way you might think. Although Wi-Fi will let you share the printer easily on a network in a micro office, the low paper capacity could leave you refilling the tray a lot.

The more attractive use of Wi-Fi is for mobile printing. Connect the printer to a network, and you can print from a phone or tablet though a Wi-Fi access point. Even better, the Wi-Fi support includes Wi-Fi Direct, which means you can connect directly from a mobile device to print, even if the printer isn’t on a network. And if your phone or tablet supports NFC, you can also connect simply by touching it to a clearly marked spot on the printer. In my tests, I connected this way with a Samsung Galaxy S III and printed without problems.

Setup, Speed, and Output QualitySetup is standard for a monochrome laser. For my tests, I connected by USB cable and printed from a Windows Vista system.

Samsung rates the M2020W at 21 pages per minute (ppm), which is the speed you should see when printing text files or other output with little to no formatting. On our business applications suite (using QualityLogic’s hardware and software for timing) it came in at 9.2ppm, which is appropriately fast for the rating. However, it’s a touch slower than the Samsung M2625D, at 9.9ppm, and significantly slower than the Brother HL-2240, at 11.4ppm.

The output quality is best described as good enough for most purposes, but not impressive. Text quality was at the low end of the range where the vast majority of monochrome lasers fall, which means it’s not quite good enough for high-quality desktop publishing, but more than good enough for almost any business use.

Graphics output was absolutely par for a monochrome laser. That makes it easily good enough for any internal business use. Most people would also consider it good enough for PowerPoint handouts and the like. Photos were at the low end of a very tight range where virtually all monochrome lasers fall, making them good enough for applications like printing recognizable photos from webpages, but not much more than that.

The one potentially serious drawback for the M2020W is its running cost, at 5.3 cents per page. In comparison, the Samsung M2625D claims 3.9 cents per page, and the Brother HL-2240 claims 3.8 cents. Compared with either of those two models, that works out to a difference of at least $1.40 for every 100 pages, $14 for every 1,000 pages, and $140 for every 10,000 pages. If you don’t expect to print many pages over the printer’s lifetime, the running cost may not be an issue. However, the more you print, the higher the difference in total cost of ownership will be.

If you have no need for the wirerless printing options in the Samsung Xpress M2020W, you will almost certainly be better off with either the Brother HL-2240 or the Editors’ Choice Samsung M2625D. Both deliver higher paper capacities and lower running costs, with the Brother HL-2240 delivering significantly faster speed and the Samsung M2625D adding a duplexer.

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Most low-priced color lasers are big disappointments: slow, with mediocre color images and costly toner prices. The Samsung Printer XPress C410W rises above some of the stereotypes, offering impressively good print quality and decently priced black toner. However, its color toners are costly, and print performance is agonizingly slow. Its ability to print via near-field communication (NFC) is interesting, though still somewhat niche. Call it an adequate low-volume printer for the home or small office, with a couple of bonus features.

Typical low-end color laser in most respects

Physically, there’s not a lot to talk about with the XPress C410W. It’s your standard, boxy laser printer that’s been with us since the first HP Laserjet. There’s a 150-sheet paper cassette at the bottom of the unit and a 50-sheet output tray integrated into the top. The front panel folds down to reveal the four svelte toner cartridges and other replaceable parts. There’s no automatic duplexer. Dialog boxes coach you through manual two-sided printing. The controls on top of the XPress C410W are simple and easy to use. The printer may be connected via Wi-Fi, Ethernet, or USB so you can place it wherever you see fit.

It took me a while to get the NFC printing to work—basically because I didn’t read the manual, which instructs you to match the tag on the back of your mobile device with the tag on the top of the printer. The lab guys got quite the kick out of my tapping manically everywhere except where I should have been.

Obviously, you must have a mobile device capable of NFC (Samsung provided a Galaxy SIII). Match tags, select what you want to print, match the tags again, and you’re golden. How often you’ll be standing next to a printer to match tags is questionable. Most of the time, printing via Wi-Fi will be more useful.

Color toner is costly

Whether the XPress C410W’s pricey toner costs will ever catch up with you depends on how much you print. The cartridges don’t last long—just 2,000 pages for black and 1,000 pages for each color. Samsung was selling them for $63.99 (black) and $54.99 (each color) at this writing, which comes out to a good 3.2 cents per page for black and a pricey 5.5 cents per color, per page. A four-color page would cost 19.7 cents. We saw lower prices for the same cartridges at other sources, so shopping around might save you a bit. This printer is designed for people who don’t print much, so it could take you a while to get through even these modest-sized cartridges. Still, you’re going to feel it when you re-supply—and that will be soon, as the Xpress C410W ships with 700-page black, and 500-page color starter cartridges.

Additional costs include a $98 imaging unit, which is good for 16,000 black pages and 4,000 color pages, as well as a $13 toner waste container that’s good for 7,500 black pages and 1750 color pages. Eventually those replacements will add another 0.8 cents per page. Not the stuff of a bargain hunter’s dreams.

Very slow performance

The XPress C410W’s speed is strictly ho-hum for a laser printer, but acceptable for the printer’s intended small- or home-office role.Text and monochrome graphics pages printed at an aggregate 8.2 per minute on the PC and 7.9 on the Mac. Small (4-by-6-inch) photos printed at about 2 pages per minute in graphics mode and 1.5 pages in photo mode. A full-page photo printed on the Mac took about 54 seconds.

What makes this all arguably worthwhile is the print quality, which is surprisingly good for a low-end model. Although we sometimes had to fiddle with settings to get the best possible quality, even the default colors printed smoothly and looked fairly realistic, whether they were fleshtones, landscapes, or objects. An inkjet in this price range, such as the HP OfficeJet Pro 8100 ePrinter, will deliver even better color quality—and likely, better ink prices and speed—but if you must stick with color laser, you could do worse than the XPress C410W.

Though the Samsung Printer XPress C410W’s NFC printing is a neat trick, it’s compelling only in a world where NFC is everywhere. It’s not. Of its other qualities, the look of the XPress C410W’s output is its best suit and may compensate for the unit’s mundane speed. We’d like this printer a lot better with more reasonable supply costs, though—at least a half-star better.

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Basically a heavier-duty version of the Samsung Printer ProXpress M3320ND$139.99 at Amazon that I recently reviewed, the Samsung Printer ProXpress M4020ND$263.97 at Amazon offers similar output quality and features, but with somewhat better paper handling and a higher monthly duty cycle. The combination makes it a particularly good fit for a micro or small office with heavy-duty print needs.

When I reviewed the M3320ND, I pointed out that although its one-sheet manual feed is useful, it’s a wimpy alternative to a multipurpose tray. The M4020ND solves that problem by including a 50-sheet multipurpose tray standard, along with its 250-sheet paper drawer and built-in duplexer (for printing on both sides of the page). That should be enough for most small offices, but if you need more, you can also add a 520-sheet second drawer ($200 street) for a total 820-sheet capacity.

The second key difference between the two is that the M4020ND’s maximum monthly duty cycle, at 100,000 pages per month, is twice the 50,000 pages the M3320ND is rated for. Keep in mind that maximum duty cycles are far higher than recommend maximums. Also, as with any printer, if you hit the maximum every month it probably won’t last all that many months. The point here is that the M4020ND is designed to print a lot more pages per month than the M3320ND without breaking.

Beyond these differences, the two printers offer almost identical features, including printing though the cloud, with built-in support for Google Cloud Print, and printing from mobile devices connecting to a Wi-Fi access point on your network, using either AirPrint or Samsung’s own mobile print app.

Setup and SpeedSetting up the M4020ND is identical to setting up the M3320ND, which makes setup absolutely standard for a mono laser. Here too, Ethernet and USB are the only connection choices. For my tests, I used Ethernet to connect to a network and printed from a system running Windows Vista.

Samsung rates the M4020ND at 42 pages per minute (ppm), which should be close to the speed you’ll see when printing text or other output that needs little to no processing. With pages that include graphics, photos, or other information that needs processing, however, the speed is much slower and not much different than you’ll see with the M3320ND’s 35-ppm engine.

On our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic’s hardware and software), I clocked the M4020ND at a respectable, but not impressive, 11.5 ppm, which counts as a tie with the M3320ND, at 11.3 ppm. It’s also just a touch faster than the Editors’ ChoiceBrother HL-6180DW$288.99 at TheNerds.net, at 10.7 ppm, but significantly slower than the Editors’ Choice Dell B2360dn$259.99 at Dell, at 15.0 ppm.

Output QualityOutput quality for M4020ND is in much the same category as the speed: acceptable for most business needs, but not impressive. Text quality is within the range that includes the vast majority of mono lasers, but at the low end of the range. It’s not quite good enough for demanding desktop publishing applications, but it’s easily good enough for anything short of that.

Graphics quality falls at a slightly lower level than most mono lasers. It’s good enough for internal business use, but whether you consider it acceptable for PowerPoint handouts or the like will depend on how critical an eye you have. Photo quality is good enough to print recognizable images from photos in Web pages, but I wouldn’t use it for anything more demanding than that.

Given its competition, the Samsung Printer ProXpress M4020ND doesn’t offer quite enough to be Editors’ Choice. The Dell B2360dn delivers faster speed, while the Brother HL-6180DW delivers better paper handling and slightly better output quality. That said, the Samsung printer is also a little faster than the Brother printer, and it offers a little better output quality overall than the Dell printer. The combination makes it a more than reasonable choice. If you need a workhorse mono printer for heavy-duty use by micro or small office standards, the Samsung Printer ProXpress M4020ND should be in the running.

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Depending on your point of view, the Samsung Multifunction ProXpress M3370FD$168.17 at Amazon is either the next step up in Samsung’s current monochrome laser multifunction printer (MFP) line from the Editors’ Choice Samsung Multifunction Xpress M2875FW$327.19 at pcRUSH.com, or the first step on the ladder for the ProXpress MFP line. As a ProXpress model it’s built around a bigger, heavier-duty engine than the Xpress M2875FW. That makes its natural home a small office or workgroup with light to medium-duty needs by small office standards, although it can also be a good fit as a heavy-duty workhorse in a micro office.

Part of what makes the M3370FD more definitively a shared printer than the Samsung M2875FW is its larger size. At 17.7 by 16.3 by 16.6 (HWD), it’s too large to share a desk with comfortably. However, a better indication of how much more heavy duty it is than the M2875FW is its 50,000-page maximum monthly duty cycle, which dwarfs the 12,000 pages for the M2875FW.

Keep in mind that maximum duty cycles for printers are far higher than recommended maximums. Even so, the higher rating means that the M3370FD is designed to churn through a lot more pages per month than the M2875FW.

BasicsAs you would expect, the M3370FD offers a full set of basic MFP features. It can print and fax from, as well as scan to, a PC, including over a network, and it can work as a standalone copier, fax machine, and email sender.

Paper handling features for printing include a 250-sheet drawer, an automatic duplexer (for two-sided printing), and a single-sheet manual tray standard, so you can feed a different paper stock without having to swap out the paper in the main tray. A multipurpose tray would be more useful, but a manual feed tray is typical for mono laser MFPs in this price range. If you need more capacity, you can also add a 520-sheet second drawer ($200 street) for a total of 770 sheets, which is something you can’t do with the Samsung M2875FW.

For scanning, the M3370FD offers a letter-size flatbed plus a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) that can handle up to legal-size pages. The ADF does simplex (one-sided) scans only, but, as a nice touch, there are options in the menus to let you copy single-sided originals to your choice of single- or double-sided copies.

Setup and SpeedSetting up the M3370FD is standard fare, with Ethernet and USB as the only connection choices. For my tests, I connected it to a network and installed the drivers and other software on a system running Windows Vista.

Samsung rates the M3370FD at 35 pages per minute (ppm), which is the speed you’ll see when printing unformatted text or other pages that need little to no processing. I clocked it on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic’s hardware and software for timing), at 10.8 ppm. That makes it just a touch faster than the Samsung M2875FW, at 10.0 ppm, and well within the typical range for the engine rating. However, it’s well short of impressive. The Editors’ Choice Canon imageClass MF4880dw$224.93 at B&H Photo-Video-Pro Audio, for example, with a rating of only 26 ppm in simplex mode, managed 12.5 ppm on our tests.

Output QualityThe M3370FD’s output quality earns much the same description as its speed. It’s good enough to be useful for most business purposes, but not particularly impressive. Text falls in the middle of the range that counts as par quality for a mono laser MFP, making it good enough for virtually any business need, but a little short of what you might want for high-quality desktop publishing.

Graphics and photos both fall at the low end of par for monochrome laser MFPs. For graphics that makes the output good enough for any internal business need. Depending on how critical an eye you have, you may or may not consider it suitable for, say, PowerPoint handouts. For photos it means you can print recognizable images from photos on Web pages or the like, but the quality will be roughly equivalent to what you’d expect to see in a newspaper.

The Samsung Multifunction ProXpress M3370FD doesn’t offer any particular feature that might make it a compelling choice, like fast speed or impressive output quality. However, it offers all the basics, including printing, scanning, faxing, copying, and direct email, plus some welcome conveniences, like copying from simplex originals to duplex copies. It also delivers an appropriate level of speed, output quality, and paper handling for a small office. If a workhorse MFP is what you need, that makes the Samsung Multifunction ProXpress M3370FD a potentially good fit.

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The Samsung ProXpress M3320ND$216.91 at pcRUSH.commono laser is the sort of printer that doesn’t stand out in any way, but delivers a level of speed, output quality, and paper handling that lets it easily do the job it is meant for. That job is primarily to fill the shared-printer slot in a micro or small office with light- to medium-duty print needs, although the printer’s small size also makes it suitable for heavy-duty personal use.

The one potential issue for the M3320ND is that its direct competition includes the Editors’ Choice Brother HL-5450DN$189.99 at B&H Photo-Video-Pro Audio. Usually with close competitors like these there are obvious tradeoffs, with one printer offering faster speed, say, and the other offering better output quality or better paper handling. With these two models, however, the M3320ND comes in tied or a close second in every important area. So although it’s a perfectly reasonable pick, there’s no stand-out feature that would make a compelling argument to choose it over the Brother HL-5450DN.

The biggest difference between the two printers is in their paper handling. Both offer a 250-sheet drawer and a built-in duplexer (for printing on both sides of the page) standard. The M3320ND also include a one-sheet manual feed. You can count that as a useful convenience, since it lets you print on a different paper stock without having to swap out the paper in the main tray, but it’s wimpy compared with the Brother printer’s 50-sheet multipurpose tray.

If you need more input capacity for the M3320ND, you can add a 520-sheet second drawer ($200 street), for a total of 770 sheets. Here again, however, Brother goes a little further, with a 500-sheet optional tray that boosts the capacity to 800 sheets. And that total still includes the multipurpose tray. Brother also sells a related model, the Brother HL-5470DW$260.01 at pcRUSH.com, which includes both the multipurpose tray and second drawer as standard, adds some other features as well, and costs less than the Brother HL-5450DN plus its optional second drawer.

Setup and SpeedSetting up the M3320ND is absolutely standard, with Ethernet and USB as the only connection choices. If you connect it to a network, you can also print to it through the cloud, thanks to its built-in support for Google Cloud Print. You can also print from a mobile device though a Wi-Fi access point on your network, using AirPrint or Samsung’s own mobile printing app. For my tests, I used a network connection and installed the drivers on a system running Windows Vista.

The engine rating for the M3320ND is 35 pages per minute (ppm), which is the speed you should see when printing text pages with little to no formatting. On our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic’shardware and software), it came in at 11.3 ppm, which counts as a respectable speed for its price and engine rating. It’s also essentially tied with both the Brother HL-5450DN, at 10.8 ppm, and the HL-5470DW, at 10.7 ppm. (A 0.5 ppm difference isn’t statistically significant in this speed range.)

Output QualityThe M3320ND’s output quality is best described as acceptable for most business use, but well short of impressive. Text quality is at the low end of the range that includes the vast majority of mono lasers. You shouldn’t have any complaints about it for day-to-day business use, but it’s not suitable for more demanding applications, like high-quality desktop publishing.

Graphics output is a step below the level where most mono lasers fall, which translates to being good enough for any internal business need. If you don’t have too critical an eye, you may also consider it acceptable for PowerPoint handouts or the like. Photo quality is dead on par for a mono laser. That makes it suitable if you need to print recognizable images from photos in Web pages but not for anything more demanding than that.

The Samsung Printer ProXpress M3320ND is a perfectly capable mono laser printer that can easily be a good fit for a micro or small office. It’s not quite a match for the Brother HL-5450DN, it’s tied with it for speed, and it comes in a close second for output quality and paper handling. That certainly makes it a credible choice. If you can find it at a sufficiently lower price than the Brother printer, it might even be your preferred choice.

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One step up in Samsung’s line from the Editors’ Choice Samsung Xpress M2625D$69.99 at Amazon that I recently reviewed, the Samsung Xpress M2825DW ($150 street) delivers essentially the same output quality, paper handling, and speed on our tests. What it primarily adds for the step up in price is Ethernet and Wi-Fi, including Wi-Fi Direct, along with support for mobile printing. As with its lesser sibling, it delivers enough to make it Editors’ Choice, but in this case as a shared printer in a micro office or as a personal printer if you need the network connection or mobile printing.

The mobile printing support lets you print through the cloud and print from Android, iOS, and Windows smartphones and tablets. For printing through the cloud, the printer has to be connected to your network, using either an Ethernet or Wi-Fi connection. For printing from a mobile device, however, you have two choices.

If the printer’s on a network, you can connect through a Wi-Fi access point. Thanks to the printer’s Wi-Fi Direct, however, you can also connect directly from your mobile device to the printer, a trick you can take advantage of even for a personal printer connected to your computer by USB cable.

Basics and SetupOther than the network and mobile printing support, there’s little difference between the Samsung M2625D and M2825DW. Both printers are the same size at 8.0 by 14.5 by 13.2 inches (HWD), making them small enough to share a desk with easily, and both weigh just 16.4 pounds. They also both offer the same paper handling, with a 250-sheet input tray, a one-sheet manual feed slot, and a duplexer (for automatic two-sided printing). This should be suitable for most personal or micro office use, but if you need more, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Samsung doesn’t offer any paper handling upgrades.

Setting up the M2825DW on a network is absolutely typical for a monochrome laser. For my tests, I connected it using the Ethernet port and installed the drivers on a system running Windows Vista.

Speed and Output QualitySamsung rates the M2825DW at 29 pages per minute (ppm) compared with 27 ppm for the Samsung M2625D. The differences showed in my tests when printing a text file with little formatting, with the M2825DW coming in at 30.3 ppm, or not quite 2 ppm faster than the M2825DW. However, the two scored essentially identical speeds on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic’s hardware and software for timing), at 9.9 ppm.

As with the Ssamsung M2625D, this counts as a good speed for the price, but not a particularly impressive one. The Editors’ Choice Brother HL-2270DW$149.99 at Sears, for example, came in at 11.7 ppm.

The M2825DW was virtually identical to the Samsung M2625D for output quality in my tests as well. Text was easily good enough for any business needs, with scores falling in the middle of a fairly tight range that includes the vast majority of mono laser printers.

Graphics and photos were both absolutely typical for a mono laser. For graphics output, that translates to being suitable for any internal business need. Depending on how critical an eye you have, however, you may or may not consider it good enough for PowerPoint handouts or the like. For photos, par quality means being able to print recognizable images from photos in Web pages and print photos in general at roughly newspaper-level photo quality.

The Samsung Xpress M2825DW is a strong contender not because of any particularly impressive feature, but because of a constellation of features that fit together well. It’s not quite fast as the Brother HL-2270DW, for example, but it delivers a highly attractive balance of speed, output quality, paper handling, and more. As a shared printer in a micro office, or a personal printer that also makes mobile printing easy, that overall balance makes the Samsung Xpress M2825DW an easy pick for Editors’ Choice.

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Coming soon to a printer near you: more NFC. Samsung said Wednesday that two color laser printers with near-field communication would be available in the U.S. starting next week. (The printers were announced in Korea last month.) The products are the Xpress C410W color laser single-function printer, which will cost $229, and the Xpress C460FW MFP color laser multifunction printer, which will cost $399.

NFC helps printers keep pace with mobile users

NFC is still most common in cell phones and tablets. But no matter how much content moves online, everyone needs to print once in a while. NFC is supposed to make it easier for that print to happen through a simple touch, though there’s also an app involved, of course.

Brother beat Samsung to the U.S. market with an NFC-equipped inkjet multifunction printer two weeks ago, the MFC-J870DW, but Samsung’s are the first laser-based models to arrive here. The C410W is your basic, low-end color laser for a home or very small office. The C460FW MFP is based on the same engine but adds a scanner and automatic document feeder for copy, scan, and fax functions.

Basic specs and probably pricey toner

Both products have top print speeds, per Samsung, of 19 pages per minute (ppm) for plain, black text and 4 ppm for color output. Paper handling includes a 150-sheet input tray and a 50-sheet output tray—best suited for low-volume use, in other words.

Here’s your other hint that these are low-end products: the toner capacities. The printers ship with starter-size cartridges that last for just 700 pages (black) and 500 pages (each color). Replacement cartridges last 1,500 pages for black and 1,000 pages for each color. A home or small-office user is assumed to print at fairly low volumes, so it may take a while even to get through those starter cartridges. But once you do, don’t be surprised if the replacement cartridges have high costs per page. That’s how it works with the cheap lasers: They get you on the toner instead.

NFC coming to business printers next

Samsung isn’t stopping there. The company says that an NFC-equipped business printer will be coming in early 2014.

To a large degree, NFC is a technology still seeking its destiny. At the same time, printers are doing their best to stay in the tech game. Adding NFC helps them keep pace, just as they all had to jump onto cloud printing a couple of years ago. For the moment, it’s a differentiator for these printers, but the truth is that unless near-field communication pops up in more products—and more services, it’s not going to get very far.

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The Samsung SF-560R monochrome MFP is a high-speed laser copier and fax machine that is built for office spaces that are not very large but require the same amount of productivity as large organizations. It is one of those MFPs that are low-volume, high on output but come at a very affordable rate.

The MFP’s 33.6 Kbps fax modem has a transmission speed of 3 seconds. It copies at speeds of up to 17 cpm and with a resolution of 300 x 300 dpi. The MFP supports several document sizes and its paper handling capacity is made easy with a 20-page automatic document feeder (ADF) and a single sheet multipurpose tray. For ease of use, the MFP has a 16-character, two-line LCD display and 80 speed dial locations.

Extremely dependable, it provides many years of service but is not high on maintenance.

Summary

The Samsung SF-560R MFP has good copying and faxing speeds, and an 80-location speed dial.

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The Samsung SCX 3405FW is a bare-bones monochrome laser multifunction printer that’s intended for a small office or department. This sturdy unit combines a high-resolution one-sided color scanner and copier, plus faxing capabilities (hence the “F” in the model number) accessible over a LAN or Wi-Fi (hence the “W”). With the exception of cable connections, all functions are performed from the front, including paper replenishment and toner service. A 700-sheet starter cartridge is included; its normal toner is rated to deliver about 1,500 pages in standard mode. There’s also an Eco mode.

For paper handling, Samsung substitutes a paper cassette for a 150-sheet front-loading paper tray, which no doubt helped rein in its relatively large 15-by-11-inch footprint. The main feeder can hold paper or as many as 10 envelopes. The output tray holds 100 sheets; there is no two-sided option. The 3405 is rated to deliver up to 10,000 pages per month. It draws 310 watts when operational, 30 watts in standby mode and 1.2 watts when sleeping. It weighs just shy of 15 pounds.

The 3405 requires about 20 inches of height clearance to access its flatbed scanner, a TWAIN-compatible color device with a native resolution of 600 x 600 dpi, and maximum resolution of 4,800 x 4,800 dpi with interpolation. Features include a 40-page auto-feeder and scan-to-PC function. Standard interfaces are USB, Ethernet and Wi-Fi; there are no ports for printing from or storing to USB drives or data cards, but Wi-Fi Direct connection support permits mobile devices to print using Apple (NSDQ:AAPL) AirPrint, Google(NSDQ:GOOG) Cloud Print or Samsung’s own Mobile Print forAndroid and iOS devices.

The Samsung SCX 3405FW lived up to its rated output speed of 21 pages per minute, but getting there was not without a few bumps. First, the performance numbers. The unit printed black-only text pages and those with integrated graphics at virtually the same pace. After a period of 31 seconds until the first page came out, the 3405 finished printing 21 pages in a total of 1:29.

Setting up the printer was a bit more difficult than most. The wireless setup utility requires a USB cable; it can’t send settings to the printer wirelessly, nor could it see the printer after it had an IP address. Configuring the printer for Wi-Fi using its control panel wasn’t a much better option. It obtained an IP address on its own, but entering the passcode using the numerical keypad was clumsy. Absent a software disc, testers went to the 3405’s download page, where manuals, software and drivers for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows can be found as separate downloads. For testing, separate downloads were required for the scanner, fax, “wireless” setup (through USB), printer management and the printer’s own driver.

Uncharacteristic of Samsung, which usually produces excellent software, the management component for the 3405 was practically unusable, as was the interface for its two-line LCD control panel. When installing the driver, the installer package quit all running apps without so much as a prompt, an absolute UI no-no in our book

In all, the Samsung SCX 3405FW performed well enough, but took longer and was more involved to set up than service resellers would probably like. But for $199, this entry-level laser MFP performed up to spec and turned out good quality printouts.